Bashar al-Assad will remain in power “for years to come” despite losing
overall control of the country, Israel’s top commander on the frontier with
Syria has said.

Major General Yair Golan, the country’s head of the Northern Command, has said that Assad will cling on to his presidency despite being weakened by defections and mass army casualities.

“I cannot see a force that will topple him tomorrow morning. But he should go, and the sooner this happens, the better”, Maj Gen Golan said.

He predicted a stalemate between pro- and anti-Assad forces, creating a “dissolution of the Syrian state”.

“The rebels cannot succeed in creating an alternative, and Assad cannot succeed in governing,” he said. “There is no one sovereign.

“In my assessment, in the coming years there will be a number of entities, not necessarily overlapping with Syria’s current borders, which will maintain a relationship of tense quiet, with warfare that flares up and subsides," he told the Israeli daily Yediot Ahranot.

The comments come after weeks of tensions over a possible revenge attack following a potential Western strike on Syria.

In a veiled warning to Hizbollah, the commander said that “a large portion of Lebanon will be destroyed” if the militia group ever attacks Israel. This was because “most of Hizbollah’s arrays of missiles are located within built up areas in Lebanon.”

A major concern for Israel in Syria has been the transfer of chemical weapons and advanced missiles to Hizbollah.

On Tuesday, Robert Serry, the UN Middle East Envoy, told the UN Security council that clashes between Assad forces and rebels on the Golan Heights could risk drawing Israel into Syria’s civil war.

Maj Gen Golan said Assad is both unwilling and also incapable of opening up a large-scale front against Israel.

“The Syrian Air Force has fired 40 to 50 percent of its long range rocket and missile arsenal”, he said, adding that even some of its surface-to-air missile batteries were taken over by the rebels.

“Any way you analyse it, the Syrian army today is much less capable than in the past, so I don’t think that today Syria can cause harm to Israel, beyond large-scale high trajectory fire.

“I wouldn’t recommend that they put us to the test”, he warned.

Assad today thanked key backer Russia for helping his regime face down a "savage attack" by Western-backed rebels, state television reported.

Russia is helping "create... a new global balance", Assad said, after Moscow opposed the use of force should the Damascus regime refuse to abide by an agreement to hand over its chemical weapons stockpile.